[Travis Covington]

I have no complaints..

3 years on team 115 and this year mentoring with team 968 i have yet to come across any time where i can say i felt as though team 60 was out to get anyone.

At the chatsworth sectional competition on sunday feb 17th, it was very competitive, in fact our robot (team 968) was one of the teams that got caught up in this mess. But i want to clarify that I, nor any of my team members, felt as though team 60 was out to get us.

It was unfortunate for us that our robot became disabled because team 60 hit us, but that was OUR FAULT that it became disabled. Our battery was not secured tightly on our bot and it disconnected itself when 60 was pushing us, thus killing power to our robot. Unfair? NO Intentional? NO were they out to get us? OF COURSE NOT

i was perfectly cool with that, they didn't damage us, the battery simply fell off and our robot lost power.

ALSO, to the people who did feel team 60 was being malicous, you must remember that we are all in this to have fun and to learn through this expirience, and we MUST stop thinking that people could be so wrapped up in winning that they would purposely damage another robot.


Another thing to point out was the aftermath of a different incident...this is the response of team 60's head coach/engineer after match in which team 60 was pushing another bot....one of the robots was slightly damaged, team 60's coach volunteered to help fix anything that was wrong with it, including machining of new parts and purchasing a new pnuematic piston. In the spirit of FIRST he volunteered to do everything he could to ensure that their robot could be repaired and be fully functional before shipping. The robot broke not because team 60 was agressive and wanted to damage anyone, it was a simple mistake. No real harm done by anyone.

also...on a different note, i was part of the inspection team, and happened to be one of 3 teams to inspect team 60's robot. I would like to point out that the "judges" that made up the inspection crew (12 or so) were very picky, the things they pointed out were sometimes obvious to the teams and should not have been mentioned, and some other things were said that were incorrect and very unneccesary, as a volunteer myself i would like to apaplogize for any teams that thought the inspectors were being picky, because honestly when they did the inspection on my teams robot, i was somewhat insulted by some of the inspectors and the "corrections" that needed to be made on our bot. Alot of it was in accurate and most was unneccesary and not needed and a PRE regional inspection.

The inspections were meant to help teams that might not know what official inspections were like, and were to ensure that all robots were legal so they wouldn't have problems at regionals. It was not meant to insult any team or to make any team feel like they had messed up anywhere.

Alot of teams needed the help while others, team 60, 330, 207, 22 etc etc etc probably did not need any advice nor help and should not have been picked on by the inspectors for the lil stupid stuff that even first doesn't care about.

so i aplogize to any teams who were insulted by the inspections and I ensure all of you that team 60 wasnt harming anyone, we were all trying to have fun. And i am sure most of us did.

Great event, great people, hope to see all those same teams out at regionals!!

thanks